In today’s episode of “Who cares what you think? You’re just some weirdo on the Internet who runs a blog that no-one reads!”, I’m going to have a go at explaining why I don’t use social media. Minor spoiler, it’s not just because I’m an anti-social computer nerd.
On most of the other blogging sites that I read, they generally have a link to that person’s Facebook page, their Twitter feed, their Instagram account and whatever else is in vogue these days, maybe a TikTok profile. I don’t have any of that on my website because I’m not a member of any of those sites. I’ve nothing against those people who do use them, but they’re not for me. Here are the main reasons why.
Firstly, I don’t want to do what a lot of people do with social media and put my whole life up on it, from what I’ve had for breakfast to what my politics are. I don’t feel that people need to know about that kind of thing, it seems very narcissistic. I also don’t like the echo chambers that the major social networks have become either; there seems to be very little in the way of intelligent discourse on them. It seems to me that too often when someone posts an opinion on Facebook or Twitter or wherever, there is one group of people who congratulate the original poster for holding the opinion and another group of people who violently disagree with them and cause a huge argument. Social networks have largely displaced the more old fashioned bulletin board forums that used to be a lot more popular on the Internet, which I think is a shame because in my experience at least, things tended to be a lot more balanced on those and there was actual moderation to weed out the crazies. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that politics in this country and elsewhere have become so polarised since social networks have gained popularity.
The main reason I don’t use social media, however, is this: Ultimately, the majority of the entities that run the social media networks are for-profit businesses. The main purpose of a for-profit business is to make money for itself and for its shareholders. Most of the social media companies don’t charge the people using their service but companies like Facebook make money hand over fist. Using Facebook as the obvious example as they’re by far the biggest social media company on the planet:
- Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook allegedly has a net worth of over $100 billion as of March 2021 and is the fourth richest man in the world.
- Facebook’s turnover in 2020 was $86 billion, with operating costs of around $53 billion according to this press release.
- Their net income after taxes, operating costs and other deductions was a little over $29 billion.
So if Facebook aren’t charging their approximately 2.8 billion active users to use their service, where on earth is this $86 billion a year coming from? I’m going to go back to using some more generic language here to at least attempt to apply this to all of the social networks, not just Facebook. Well, every time you like someone’s social media post or post an opinion about something on social media, that social media company is tracking that. Every time you upload a photo, tag yourself in a coffee shop or whatever, that social media company is gathering that data. They know who you are, who your friends are, what you like and where you like going. They probably know your political persuasions, your ethnicity, your age and your sexual orientation. If you’ve commented on art, literature or films they know your taste in that. If you’ve linked your profile to members of your family, they know who you’re related to. They probably know if you’ve got children or if you’re pregnant. Chances are they know which schools, college and university you attended, who you currently work for and who you have worked for. All of this data is used to generate a profile about you and then that data is sold to advertisers. Because they have such specific and personal data about you, an advertiser could specify that they want a database of people who are 30-40 years old, like Boursin cheese and who voted Labour in the last election. That advertiser would then push tailored adverts to anyone in that list. That makes the kind of data being gathered worth a lot of money.
To make things worse, a lot of them have trackers which third party websites can install which continue to gather data about you, even when you’re not using their site. Picking on Facebook again, you will find their trackers on numerous news websites so even without liking a post on Facebook or viewing it from a link on their site, they still know that you’ve looked at an article and would have added that to your profile.
They gather a large amount of incredibly personal data about their users and what I’ve put above here probably isn’t even scratching the surface the surface. Now, I have no doubt that all the social networks have strict privacy policies and that they follow the relevant data protection rules, like the GPDR in the EU and UK, in all their dealings. I’m sure that the data they sell to their advertisers is anonymised and that if Boursin bought a database of 30-40 year olds who voted Labour in the last election, they wouldn’t be able to track that back to an individual but that all said, gathering all that data is still really creepy.
So in short, the reason that I don’t use social media is the average social media user is not that social media network’s customer. No, that average social media user is that social media company’s product. They are selling you to whoever wants to pay for you. That disgusts me. People willingly give all of this data to the social media companies. That disturbs me. Mark Zuckerberg is on record as saying that ‘Privacy is no longer a social norm‘. He is alleged to have said ‘Privacy is dead, get over it’. Yeah, I don’t want a company like that with my data.
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